


that's why the dark is there

by starstrung



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Holo-Jack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 16:31:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5750260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You ain’t even seen the half of it, kiddo,” Handsome Jack tells him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that's why the dark is there

**Author's Note:**

> I'm exiling myself to a volcano, but not before making uncomfortably long eye contact with [radiophile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/radiophile) and [endquestionmark](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark).

“You ain’t even seen the half of it, kiddo,” Handsome Jack tells him. He has his feet propped up on his desk, the blue outline of him shivering with static each time Rhys blinks. Jack has been watching Rhys find his way through his office, narrating when he feels like it, and ordering Rhys to move on when he doesn’t.

Rhys doesn’t know what he expected - the severed ears of Jack’s enemies, or maybe a shelf of inventive torture weapons - but not a framed picture of a girl with gaps in her teeth, not a hat so weathered that Rhys feels secondhand nostalgia looking at it.

It doesn’t seem right to him, somehow, that even a legend like Handsome Jack has people that he misses.

“Show me,” Rhys says, looking up at Jack from the foot of the stairs. Jack flickers to his feet and towers monumental in Rhys’s vision, his smile as indulgent as it is merciless.

He leads Rhys to a door leading off from the office. “You know, I think the last time I went in here here, I was high on something special the guys down in Chem cooked up, and she was trying to get my dick out of my pants and walk backwards at the same time,” Jack says, wistful. “Not very well, mind you. Might have sprained an ankle, but she didn’t do much walking for a few days after that. Shit, that was a good time.”

Rhys stumbles back from the door, suddenly skittish, and all he gets as warning is an impatient “C’mere,” before Jack takes control of Rhys’s robotic arm, using it to yank Rhys closer to the door and punch in the key code.

The door slides open to a dark room, and Rhys doesn’t move his feet.

“Hey pumpkin, you scared of the dark?” Jack taunts.

Rhys scowls and makes himself walk inside. He should probably be warier, he thinks, more cautious. But letting Jack test him is like running a thumb against something sharp to see if it’ll cut - either he’ll be disappointed and unscathed, or he’ll bleed, and he won’t know it himself until he tries.

All the same, he wishes he could light his way with his palm light, but Jack still has control of his cybernetics. He’s learned enough in that past few days to know that asking would be a mistake, that Jack wants him to stumble blindly just as much as he wants Rhys to follow orders. He slowly gropes his way forward with his other arm extended.

“Light switch is on the left, Rhysie,” Jack tells him, bored.

He moves to the side and his outstretched fingers find the wall. He feels for the switch, and flicks it on. He has time to blink, dazed by the sudden brightness, before a ceiling panel slides open, and a whirring ensemble of spiked wheels and gleaming razor blades extends towards him.

Rhys yelps and throws himself out of the way, the death machine following after him. He ducks behind a door, hoping it will stop it. It starts sawing into the metal to get to him, and the screeching noise sets his teeth on edge and sets off a shower of sparks.

“Jack! What the hell is going on?” he yells.

“All right, keep your panties on,” Jack says, voice almost unbearably loud in Rhys’s head to compensate for the sound of screaming metal. Rhys’s ECHO lights up with a scroll of coding too fast to follow. Seconds pass, in which Rhys swears he can feel sharp, hot metal at his back, and then it goes quiet.

He peeks around the door to find that the blades and spikes are retreating back into the ceiling, panel closing behind them like they were never there.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Rhys says, and slides to the floor, the surprise of still being alive making his knees weak.

Jack materializes in front of him, doubled over in laughter, and Rhys’s right hand clutches at his ribs in a mirror of Jack’s own hand, just the wrong side of too tight. “Oh man, totally forgot I put those there. Hah! Your insides could have been painting the walls right now, buddy. That would have been _hilarious_.”

“How do you forget installing a _death trap_?” Rhys asks, trying not to squirm away from the hand still clenched around his side.

“You tend to lose count after the first eight or so. Eh, so maybe the Chem guys had paranoia listed as a side effect. Whatever. A little paranoia never killed anyone, except you, almost, literally just now. With _knives_. But now we know that no one’s been in here and touched my stuff. You don’t see anyone decomposing, do you?”

Rhys doesn’t. In fact, there’s an untouched layer of dust on everything. The last time anyone came in here, Handsome Jack still drew breath.

He looks around, and finds that he ducked into a closet. Clothes hang in rows along the walls. Jack’s clothes. The hand releases Rhys’s ribs to dig a metal finger into the soft side of his stomach.

“Ow!” Rhys says, trying to push his hand away and failing.

“ _Ow_!” Jack mocks, and pokes him again, harder. “You going to sit there all day, or are you going to try something on?”

Rhys scrambles to his feet before Jack can poke him again, his side already feeling like it’s bruising. “Are you serious?” he asks.

“Yeah, no offense kiddo, but you kind of smell like guts and skag shit right now. Not a good aroma. I mean, sure, _I_ can pull it off, but I can pull off a lot of things, so that’s not really saying much in the end. Go on. Pick out something pretty for me, cupcake.”

He’s still too disbelieving to be embarrassed by the tentative way he strokes the sleeve of a coat, which probably costs more than all of his cybernetics did, and he’s _still_ paying those off. He forgets about Gortys beacon, about the plan. He takes a shirt off of its hanger and blanches when he realized there are bloodstains on the cuffs, faded but unmistakable.

“Hey, you know it’s been a productive day when even the most expensive dry cleaning doesn’t get the blood out. I killed a lot of people in this shirt,” Jack says fondly. “Good choice.”

Jack flickers in the doorway of the closet and gestures for Rhys to follow him into the next room. Rhys’s eyes slide over the bed that takes up most of the room, huge, ridiculously lavish. He looks away and focuses on the mirror that Jack is standing in front of, almost as impressive as the bed. Jack’s tastes, however ostentatious, are consistent at least.

“All right, first of all, this? This has to go.” Jack yanks at Rhys’s tie and it tightens around Rhys’s neck for a moment, turning his vision dark before the knot gives way. Jack yanks it out of Rhys’s belt and tosses the tie to the ground. Rhys’s Hyperion vest is quick to follow.

“Hey, hold on, wait,” Rhys says, because Jack still has his arm and he’s using it to yank Rhys’s shirt out of his belt now, and Rhys is just now realizing that “pick out something pretty” meant Jack actually intends to fucking _dress_ him.

“Hold still,” is all Jack says, and he grabs a fistful of the collar of Rhys’s shirt and yanks until the buttons rip open. Rhys’s protest at having his shirt ruined dies in his throat at the appraising look on Jack’s face.

“Oh, Rhys, _Rhys_ , you’ve been holding out on me, man,” Jack laughs, delighted, standing behind Rhys in the mirror and studying Rhys’s tattoos with a grin. Rhys catches sight of his own expression in the mirror, and has to look away, school his features into something less desperate, and wide open.

He got his tattoos when Hyperion first hired him, planning on using them to fit in, but he would never say this out loud. Especially to Jack, who probably doesn’t even think of “fitting in” as something that you’re even meant to _do_.

“Cute, real cute,” Jack says, pushing the rest of the shirt off of Rhys’s shoulders to bare more of the tattoo running down Rhys’s left arm. “It’s almost a shame that you’d lose them.”

Jack snorts. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I have a plan, a great plan. I’ll be completely honest, I might have come up with it, like, just now. You’ll love it, though, I promise. How about everything from here down,” Jack says, and lays cold metal fingers against the skin of Rhys’s left shoulder, makes a snipping motion, “we cut off.”

“ _What_?” Rhys says.

“Then we get you another arm, new model and everything. Only the best for my Rhysie,” Jack says sweetly, and with a sinking feeling, Rhys realizes where this going.

“Then I can use _both_ of your arms. Hey, and why stop there? Might as well go all the way. Get you a shiny pair of legs too. Then I could walk around for you too. We could trade off every twelve hours, yeah? Get some stims from the Chem guys, help you stay awake an extra few hours every day, we’re in business, baby.”

“Jack-” Rhys says.

“Hey!” Jack says, sharply, catching the wavering note in Rhys’s voice like he was lying in wait for it. “Don’t let yourself forget who got you here, pumpkin. We have a bright future ahead of us. Lots of people are going to _wish_ that they’re you. Now, let’s see you put this on.”

Rhys dresses one-handed in Jack’s shirt and buttons it. His shoulders aren’t as wide as Jack’s - the stained cuffs fall past Rhys’s wrists, and the sleeves hang loose around his arms. Still, Rhys’s breath catches at the sight of it, at Jack considering his reflection in the mirror.

“No, no, not like this. Roll up your sleeves,” Jack tells him, and Rhys does so, tucking them up at his elbows just like he’s seen Jack do. It doesn’t look right on him, nowhere near as effortless and spontaneous as it does on Jack.

He sees it in the frustrated frown on Jack’s face as he uses Rhys’s cybernetic arm to pop open the top few buttons of the shirt. Jack doesn’t just want Rhys wear his clothes, he wants Rhys to wear his _look_. Rhys feels vaguely ridiculous about it, but there’s something dark and determined in Jack’s eyes and Rhys doesn’t dare say anything, or let it show in his face.

Jack doesn’t stop with the buttons, starts messing with Rhys’s hair. His world narrows to the way Jack pulls his gelled hair out of its shape until it’s falling into Rhys’s eyes. The joints of his hand snag in Rhys’s hair, pulling painfully at his scalp and Rhys makes a breathless sound.

Jack’s focus sharpens on him, and Rhys’s face heats up when Jack’s gaze turns south, at the erection straining against the crotch of his pants.

“Sorry,” Rhys says, mortified at the reaction he’s having, in front of _Jack_ , of all people. But of course, it would be Jack, of all people, who would have this effect on him.

“Don’t fucking say sorry, cupcake, this is _me_ we’re talking about, remember?” Jack says, and he drops his hand from Rhys’s hair to cup his erection.

Rhys gasps, because nothing about Jack - including the hand flexing fingers around him through his pants - is gentle. He squirms away, but not very far, not out of range. Jack’s grin in the mirror widens and he lazily strokes the palm of his robotic arm over Rhys’s dick.

“Look at you,” Jack says, clearly enjoying himself. “All hot and ready to be sexed up, just for me.”

Rhys knows - he can hear it in the gleeful note in Jack’s voice - that Jack isn’t enjoying getting Rhys off so much as he’s enjoying teasing Rhys until he has him dangling over the edge with it. He hopes this doesn’t come back to bite him. He hopes Jack doesn’t notice him leaning his hips forward, rubbing himself on the palm of Jack’s - his - hand. He hopes Jack doesn’t stop.

“Think I can make you come in your pants?” Jack says. “Shit, I hate these pants. I have much better pants. But your ass is so puny they might fall right off.”

“Please, Jack,” Rhys says, tries to push Jack’s hand away, but the metal is unyielding.

“Please, Jack, _what_?” Jack says.

“Please,” Rhys says, licks his lips. “If you’re just playing around - if you’re not actually going to -”

“If I’m not actually going to what? Have you watch while your own cybernetic arm jerks you off and you come all over this mirror? Rhys, Rhys, Rhys. It’s like you don’t know me at all.” Jack unzips Rhys’s pants and shoves his underwear out of the way, freeing his dick.

And then Rhys has to grip the frame of the mirror for support, because if he doubted Jack’s intentions before, he doesn’t anymore. Jack has his hand stroking up and down the length of his dick, the feeling of cold metal on flushed hot skin making him hiss through his teeth.

Rhys looks up at himself in the mirror, and almost goes over the edge right there. His hair is falling into his eyes from when Jack was playing around with it, and the neck of Jack’s shirt is falling low over Rhys’s collarbone. On Jack, it makes him look confident, heroic. On Rhys it just makes him look small. Jack stands behind him, looks him right in the eye, even as he pumps his hand over Rhys’s dick.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Jack says, and he slows down enough that Rhys is fighting the urge to whine, “I have a drawer of things I never got around to trying out. You ever try fucking yourself on an ancient Eridian dildo? ‘Course, nobody knows for _sure_ it’s a dildo. All I know is that, for that much money, it better be going up _somebody’s_ ass, or-”

Rhys doesn’t hear anymore after that, too busy spending himself on the surface of the mirror, over the robot hand, head falling back with the sudden force of it. Jack’s hand on his dick doesn’t slow up until the very last second.

When Jack’s done, he raises his fingers to Rhys’s lips. Rhys feels like he’s floating, limitless. He looks Jack in the eye and licks the metal fingers clean.

“Good boy,” Jack says, and just like that, Rhys has control of his arm again. After so long, it feels heavy, foreign, like someone else’s limb.

“Now, c’mere,” Jack says, leading him back out towards the office. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.”

Rhys follows.

**Author's Note:**

> My [tumblr](http://www.shadowsbroker.tumblr.com).


End file.
